Anya Silver

Articles by Anya Silver

In the crate of ornaments not to be touched,rested in cotton my mother’s golden walnuts:glass, thinner than egg shells, easily shattered.She hung them from the boughs herself.

Real nuts, we ate on Advent evenings,sitting round the burning wreath, crackinghazelnuts and almonds, peeling tangerines.My father split the walnuts single-handed,then let us root out gnarled halves and pieces.Each nut, a mystery beneath its sealed shell.

I hate mysteries, my son proclaims one day.And yet, he sits all season snapping nuts,gathering pecans from the back lawn,separating the green and black or gnawed.

The tools—a toothed and silver hinge, a screwand lever, assorted picks—he places on the table.Some of the harvested will be rotten, some unripe.The best emerge from cocoons as rich as butter,most in shards and others whole. All of thesewill be put to use in pies and bread.

He works quietly, entirely focused on the task.On the oilcloth, a pile of husks easily swept away,and the delight of knowledge, gleaming brownand full of grace as a new pair of shoes.

There’s a stranger in the field of apples.Somebody’s hands have left a blushon the Staymans, have scattered half-rotten fruit in which wasps will burrow.Somebody’s presence has spun the sugar,banished bitterness from yellow cores.Pips have polished themselves like beaksof sparrows, Sweet Wines waxed tender.

Now is the time for us to climb laddersand fill a crate for our family’s pleasure.To hear the ticktock of falling fruit.To lighten the bearded branches.

Let husbands feel the round arms of their wives,and wives laugh in voices rich as custard.

Let there be shouting like shaken tambourines!Let the musician bring his fiddle!

The Quaker Meeting House in which we wedwas shabby—its carpet faded Wedgewood blue,no festive flowers in a vase, or ribboned pews.But I loved the butter-yellow stucco walls,and the little graveyard at the back, ivy-grown,where only the tops of squat square stones showngrey above the vines. Beneath the eaves, we heldfor view our newly golden fingers, the charmsthrough which we’d changed from two to one.

We knew a great thing had been done.We were to be each other’s rune and grail,trunk and totem, handkerchief and spoon.Forsaking sex with all others, refusingescape alone from trouble, we promised to clingto the human whom we’d named and kissed.And what a wonder that we did, and have, that yearshave proved us braver than we knew, and merry,too, love still searching out each other’s hands,as when, beneath the poplars’ summer green,we walked from vows to wedding cake and dancing,and cars drove in the street below the underpass,distracted, to their many destinations.

The same morning I press my shorn chestflat against an x-ray machine, my sisterpushes from her body a baby girl.Praise God, whose hand passes over itselflike river currents as it gives and takes,pulls one film from the whirring machinewhile pushing in a new, unprinted slide.Praise God for this fearful doubling, overwhich I will sometimes weep and curse.Little breathing at the still whole breastof my sister, little gold seed of deathawakening as the first sun touches its tendrils.